Founding AI Lead - Forward Deployed Engineering

Job Description

Founding AI Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering

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About the Opportunity

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A leading global alternative asset management firm, with more than $300 billion in assets under management and teams across private equity, impact, credit, real estate, and market solutions, is hiring a founding AI lead to help build a new Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team.

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This is a builder-leader role. You'll set up the function from scratch: hiring the team, defining how it operates, and setting the technical bar. You'll also stay hands-on, writing code and shipping production-ready AI products inside the firm's highest-value workflows. You'll start with a small team of VP-level engineers and scale the capability as demand and impact grow.

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You'll work directly with Partners, Managing Directors, and department heads to find the problems worth solving, shape ambiguous opportunities into real plans, and decide when a prototype is ready to become a product.

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What You'll Do

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• Build and lead the FDE function, starting with VP-level engineers. Hire, mentor, and retain strong engineers, and set the culture, standards, and talent model as the team grows.
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• Manage team capacity, prioritization, and resource allocation to maximize business impact across the FDE portfolio.
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• Define the operating model: how opportunities are identified, prioritized, scoped, evaluated, shipped, adopted, handed off, scaled, or retired.
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• Build AI products, digital coworkers, and workflow solutions that solve meaningful business problems across the firm.
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• Guide the team on when to use agentic workflows, multi-agent architectures, retrieval systems, automation, traditional software, process redesign, or simply recommend not building at all.
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• Set technical standards for AI products, including architecture patterns, security, access controls, observability, documentation, support expectations, and production readiness.
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• Establish firm-wide standards for AI evaluation, reliability, and release readiness, covering quality, safety, business effectiveness, regression testing, and model or workflow drift.
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• Partner with Security, Compliance, Legal, Data, Infrastructure, and application teams so AI solutions respect information barriers, entitlement models, audit requirements, and secure development practices.
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• Partner with senior stakeholders to set clear expectations on what AI systems can and cannot do.
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What We're Looking For

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• 10+ years of experience in software engineering or AI engineering and experience leading teams and delivering complex enterprise solutions.
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• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field (equivalent practical experience considered).
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• A proven record of building teams and setting technical standards, raising the bar without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
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• Experience building, scaling, or transforming an engineering function, platform, or capability, including the standards, talent model, and operating cadence
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• Hands-on AI application development, including model integration, context and retrieval design, evaluation frameworks, agentic workflows, workflow orchestration, human-in-the-loop processes, and production deployment.
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• Experience building AI solutions on unstructured data such as investment memos, CIMs, credit agreements, LP communications, contracts, financial statements, and presentations.
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• Strong production engineering discipline: code review, testing, version control, CI/CD, secure development, documentation, and operational ownership.
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• A product mindset: you identify the underlying problem, weigh alternative approaches, and deliver solutions people actually adopt.
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• The ability to earn trust quickly with senior stakeholders, communicate trade-offs clearly, and turn ambiguous business needs into an executable technical plan.
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• Financial services fluency, with interest in or experience with investment, fund operations, or financial services workflows.
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Technology

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The team is technology agnostic and picks the right tool for each problem. You'll need credibility in modern AI application development and enterprise-grade software delivery. The team works with a range of technologies, including:

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• Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Java, .NET, or similar languages
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• OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Azure AI, Microsoft Copilot, and Copilot Studio
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• Agentic and multi-agent architectures, tool calling, orchestration frameworks, and RAG
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• Evaluation, observability, and model monitoring frameworks
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• APIs, integrations, workflow automation, and distributed systems
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• Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and cloud-native architectures
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• Databricks, SQL Server, vector databases, and modern data platforms
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• CI/CD, test automation, and secure development practices
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Why Join?

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• Founding role: You'll build the function, its standards, and its culture from the ground up, with real input on how AI gets built and deployed across the firm.
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• High-value problems: Your work will sit inside core investment and fund workflows, with direct exposure to senior investment professionals and operating leaders.
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• Ownership: You decide what gets built, what gets bought, and what gets left alone, and you own the path from prototype to production.
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• Real constraints, real impact: Information barriers, entitlements, and audit requirements are part of the job, so what you ship has to work in a regulated environment and get used.
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• Scale potential: You'll start with a small team of senior engineers and have the chance to grow the function as demand and impact increase.
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• Broad technical latitude: The team is technology agnostic, so you'll work across multiple model providers, cloud platforms, and modern data tooling.
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